Inventive Sparks, Engineering
Skills and Dark Obsessions

By

Kenneth Silverman

Updated Sept. 24, 2001 1:15 a.m. ET

It is possible that among the targets of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center was modernity itself, with its busy engines of commerce and its thrusting technological prowess. The towers, one supposes, were emblems of both. In "The Fire of His Genius" (Free Press, 242 pages, $24), Kirkpatrick Sale looks back at an early moment in the history of American technology and capitalism, and he does not like what he sees. What he offers is a polemical biography of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, and a...